


à contre-jour

by changdictator



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Art School, Alternate Universe - Artists, Angst with a Happy Ending, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:20:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25190095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/changdictator/pseuds/changdictator
Summary: “Your hair’s gotten long again,” Kyungsoo observes.Jongin is standing by the window again, his shirt stripped off and his feet bare. He looks at Kyungsoo and smiles lazily, “You could cut it for me.”“Or you could go to a stylist,” Kyungsoo says.Jongin waits until Kyungsoo is by his side before saying, “But I like it better when you do it.”(Art AU -- In which Kyungsoo is a commercial art collector and Jongin does not come home.)
Relationships: Byun Baekhyun/Park Chanyeol, Do Kyungsoo | D.O/Kim Jongin | Kai, Lu Han/Oh Sehun
Comments: 21
Kudos: 120





	à contre-jour

Kyungsoo comes home and he’s taken up that corner of the couch again, face buried in the cushions and limbs splayed over the edges. The music pounding out of his headphones is stentorian in the soft squeeze of the silence, and the steady rise and fall of his back hardly discernible beneath the dark. His weathered duffle bag sits half-open on the doormat, a sloppy greeting.

Kyungsoo kicks it in place beside the shoe rack and asks, “How’d you break in, Houdini?”

“Who said I broke in?” comes Jongin’s voice, muffled and flat. The TV is running on mute beside him. Shadows fill in the lazy crook of his lips as he pushes himself upright, tilting his chin towards a key on the table.

“I didn’t give you that key.”

“It was under the garden tile,” he says.

“Thief,” Kyungsoo says.

“Didn’t you leave it there for me to find?” Jongin asks, face contorting with the glee of being right, and Kyungsoo waves away his loss.

As a rule, Jongin wins every argument.

Only because Kyungsoo is too tired to fight him on it.

Shrugging, he heads for the kitchen to fix himself a drink. Jongin has moved to the window by the time Kyungsoo returns, where he is slouched rubbing sleep from his face and scratching absently at his stomach. Seoul glows in his eyes, the cityscape in them glimmering and suspended like droplets of paint moments before they hit the canvas.

Kyungsoo pops down on the windowsill, drinks, and watches Jongin breathe.

They don’t talk for a long time, and then Jongin finally asks, after Kyungsoo’s nearly finished his whiskey, “So, you missed me?”

“Sure.”

Jongin takes the glass from Kyungsoo to steal a sip, eyes flicking from Kyungsoo’s and back, “Wow. Is it a thing to drink cat pee now?”

“You mean vintage Scotch--”

“I think,” Jongin says, “You should ask me about how I like your vintage Scotch.”

“I’m not asking you about how you like my Scotch,” Kyungsoo says, reaching for the tumbler.

Jongin moves his arm away so that it’s barely out of reach and Kyungsoo doesn’t yield, leaning forward on his toes to swipe for it.

He fails at first, and of course he does, because this is Jongin, this is someone who he would never win against, but then he registers the warmth of Jongin’s chest against his, the proximity of their faces, Jongin’s nose brushing slowly over his own. For once Jongin is not a disembodied voice on the other end of the phone but right in front of him, flesh and bones and abrupt laughter. It hits him hard, all of this, an ambush. Kyungsoo’s breath stops as he trips forward. Everything flies out of sync.

Jongin catches him by the shoulder and Kyungsoo looks up, unexpectedly breathless--

Only Jongin is laughing still, eager and enthusiastic, ready to play. Kyungsoo feels a phantom lump growing in his throat. He looks down quickly, cheeks burning.

With his voice a notch higher, Jongin says, “As I see it, this full-bodied drink with its layers of peatiness must be the aftermath of marinating all of Chelsea’s old socks in a big tub of--”

“Keep scrunching your nose like that, Jongin,” Kyungsoo mutters, finally managing to wrestle the drink away. His body suddenly feels odd, like a favorite tee worn backwards, the texture of it familiar but the seams sharp and defiant, “and you’ll end up with more lines on your face than the Berlin subway map.”

At this Jongin cracks up. Shoulder-shaking, whole-body laugh. Kyungsoo has no idea what Jongin finds funny, even if he’s wearing the same grin himself. He drinks and straightens, turning around to look out the window. Jongin steps into place beside him, throwing an arm around his shoulder, the weight of it nostalgic.

They come so close Kyungsoo can distinctly feel him breathing into his ear, smelling of alcohol. He pretends not to care only he does. It’s been so long. It could have been his fault. Perhaps he has no right to feel angry. Perhaps it can be amended, one more time, this growing gap between them.

Neither of them are laughing anymore. He thinks he might want to kiss Jongin; just a half turn, press right into him. He can kiss that smile off of Jongin like a punch to the lips--he can, goddamn it. And he’s nearly there, quarter way turned around when Jongin’s fingers lock under his chin. Jongin closes the other half of the distance in a blink, his lips a trigger than Kyungsoo breathes against. Their lips touch, tentatively, just a brush of skin against skin, before Jongin leans in and Kyungsoo inhales and--

Then he remembers--remembers a lot of things all at once: the sparkle of the hotel lounge, the woman’s smile, her voice rounded on the phone--vaguely, a cold kick to the guts, and he pulls away. He says, “Well okay, I’ve got an early day tomorrow--”

Jongin is already reeling back. “I’m going to crash--mind if I take the bed?” he asks.

“No, no, go rest,” Kyungsoo says. That is not what he means to say. He should tell Jongin to stop. That he wants Jongin to stop. But there are a thousand words in his head and this combination already tumbled out. Half of him thinks that he should try again, except the other half of him realizes that Jongin’s already too far away. And plus, he reeks too much of perfume, and the lipstick on his shirt needs washing.

Minutes later, his phone begins vibrating in his pocket. A call. Kyungsoo glances at the washroom, at the outline of Jongin’s silhouette in the mirror, and he ignores it.

••••••••••••

By the time the five-thirty alarm rings, Kyungsoo has already counted all the dents in the ceiling twice. Jongin is snoring lightly to his right, curled into himself save for a hand around Kyungsoo’s wrist, slackened with sleep. His pillow is falling off the bed.

Kyungsoo automatically tucks it back underneath before he crawls up. For a few seconds he does nothing and just sits there, studying the outline of Jongin’s face. Sometimes Jongin has this thing going on where he looks like a five year old wearing a face two decades too old, except he is exactly the type to read manga under the bedcovers and hard-boil eggs in microwaves. Jongin has a knack for running away, a lanky funk and a certain transparency of adolescence all crammed into some cocked-up, idealistic notion of purpose.

Kyungsoo cards his fingers through Jongin’s hair, wondering briefly how long it will be before Jongin disappears again.

But he should know by this point and he cares to know, but he’s never asked. Along the same vein, when Jongin disappears Kyungsoo has no idea where he’s gone or how long he’s planning to go. The first time Jongin left, he was back in a week. The last time Jongin left was two years ago. If Kyungsoo can draw any kind of projection from this it wouldn’t be one he wants to think about, not with the nomadic way that Jongin packs--nothing other than the clothes on his back and that duffle bag of paint bottles and an old, creased and washed out photo of their first date in his windbreaker--which Kyungsoo likes to think is there not intentionally but because Jongin’s forgotten to throw it away.

Sighing, Jongin rolls away. Kyungsoo lets go and takes his phone from the counter.

Sehun’s e-mail is the first of a long list gathered in his phone. Kyungsoo scrolls through them between washing up and changing. He sorts them into folders and prioritizes them by color, responding to some between toweling off. He finds a text from the woman, saying that he’d forgotten his watch, and he deletes it. Jongin stirs once, as Kyungsoo slides into the vest of his grey three piece. He doesn’t wake.

Before he goes to work Kyungsoo cooks for three; it’s been months since he’s made breakfast. The pan handle feels odd in his hand, though not all bad. In the apartment there is silence, and there is the warmth of dawn.

He leaves Jongin two portions of egg benedict wrapped and centered on the dining table.

••••••••••••

“There is a giant thing sitting in my office,” Kyungsoo says, after retracing twelve steps back to Sehun’s work bench down the hallway, “In my chair. With his feet on my table.”

Sehun doesn’t bother looking up from his phone, waving a carton of some alarmingly green juice in Kyungsoo’s general direction, “Yes, that would be Park Chanyeol, sir. He’s been waiting for you here since, uh, he claims three in the morning?”

Kyungsoo screws his eyes shut and opens them again, taking one long and deep breath, “You could have at least asked security to tow his car.”

“Then he would’ve been stuck here forever, obviously,” Sehun says dismissively, “Unless we have a restraining order, which frankly we don’t, so it’s illegal--”

“You’re fired, Sehun,” Kyungsoo says, “Pack your things.”

Sehun finally stops playing with his phone and gives Kyungsoo this deadpan look that almost gets Kyungsoo thinking that he’s done something unspeakably irrational, “Shouldn’t you at least ask me to find a replacement, sir?”

“DO KYUNGSOO,” comes the very squawk Kyungsoo has spent his entire life avoiding, “LET’S HAVE LUNCH.”

Kyungsoo turns to Sehun one last time, “I want you gone by the time I get out.”

••••••••••••

Mid-afternoon, they’re sitting at the back of a steakhouse. Chanyeol chatters steadily away, while Kyungsoo hovers between ignoring how the rest of the lunch pack is stealing glances at them or asking Chanyeol to lower his voice for the umpteenth time.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Chanyeol says, showing Kyungsoo a photograph of his newest purchase on his iPad, nearly knocking his fork off the table. It’s hanging off the wall of his apartment in--Tokyo, potentially. Or Manchester. Kyungsoo stopped keeping track of Chanyeol’s realestate flings years ago.

“It’s good,” Kyungsoo says, running his eyes along the length of the stroke. It’s all there is, a single scream etched from one end of an 16x31 to the other. Two meters of encaustic paint swells into tides, the weight of it like a pendulum, pulling his eyes back to the origin.

This is fine art no doubt, but this isn’t useful art. The colors are too noisy, suffocating under its own presence, and the brushwork too rough. Out of the hands of some kid still green around the gills--no matter the potential--it’s just a blip on the radar. These days people buy art to impress, art impossible to understand. Art to sit collecting money and dust, art as the new currency in culture.

Here is a scream that under slack water doesn’t resound more than the bubbles breaking over the surf--at least not while the artist is still alive. A naive attempt, the kind that Kyungsoo resents most.

“Stole it for a hundred grand!” Chanyeol exclaims, proud.

Kyungsoo stares at him, slicing his filet mignon like he’s planning on putting it back together, “Chanyeol, to begin with, you just don’t throw this kind of money at a nobody--”

“Except this, this is great work,” Chanyeol protests, chewing his mouthful of peas with great fervor. He’s gotten good at rebounding from Kyungsoo’s rejections over the years, though probably because that is the only thing Kyungsoo ever gives him, out of the obligation of friendship.

“No,” Kyungsoo says, “This is you being confused over a keen desire to suck off whoever you bought this from--”

Chanyeol jerks back so fast he nearly knocks over their three-hundred dollar bottle of Lafite “Wow, no Kyungsoo, I don’t want to suck off Baekhyun.”

“I knew it,” Kyungsoo says. Byun’s paintings are always just barely decent, clearly put together by someone who’d slept through first year in art college, banked on expulsion, but was good enough to graduate on sheer aptitude. There’s a quiet, explosive element about it, the muffled tick of a bomb under a pillow seconds to detonation. It helps that every painting Chanyeol’s bothered to buy were mysteriously found on the streets of London. “If you’re so into rescuing starving English artists why don’t you just buy him a gallery?”

Chanyeol blinks, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. Kyungsoo isn’t unfamiliar with this look. It was there the summer after high school, when he’d off-handedly suggested that Chanyeol ought to enroll in art school to spite his parents. Chanyeol became so convinced that he turned down his Seouldae acceptance and spent two months ghosting around Jongin and Kyungsoo’s art classes. It was also there when Jongin told Chanyeol he could hit on Kyungsoo’s new assistant, Sehun, by hacking his blog and reading all the private posts. After that Chanyeol received a dazzling shiner and Sehun never spoke a word to Chanyeol again, though Chanyeol did wind up in a software start-up that shot him into too much money for him to know what to do with.

And it’s there now, when Chanyeol says, amazed, “You’re right. You are absolutely right.”

Kyungsoo paws at the table, trying desperately to salvage the situation, “Whatever you’re thinking is not what I was implying, I can assure you.”

“I’m going to ship him here and we’re going to make that midget into a somebody.”

“No we’re not,” Kyungsoo says, stomach hitting the floor, “All you’re going to do is waste your time and my reputation.”

“Not unless it turns out good, which it will, which it definitely, definitely will.”

“This reeks of bad decision-making.”

“Oh no, chap. I only ever make good decisions.”

“You’re going to regret this,” Kyungsoo groans, rubbing his forehead, “We both are.”

Chanyeol’s mouth straightens into a thin line, “The only thing this is, is an opportunity, and you’re not willing to take it.”

“Chanyeol,” Kyungsoo says, trying to be reasonable, “Don’t be upset--”

“I’m not,” Chanyeol says, “Why, are you?”

“No--why would I be?”

“Because you look like you want to punch me in the face right now,” Chanyeol smiles. Kyungsoo manually massages his eyebrows back down to where they belong. He says, “I get it. You don’t like risks. That’s why you’re a dealing art, not creating it.”

“Oh, don’t,” Kyungsoo waves his fork, “Art dealing is every bit as uncertain as--”

“When you look at art all you see is a list of numbers,” Chanyeol says, “You analyze art by dissecting it and fitting the parts into the latest auction trends, the percent gains and losses in purchase and sales, things that you can understand and calculate, how much you’ll profit. What is that if it’s not avoiding risk?”

“Well no, not really,” Kyungsoo stutters, trying to come up with a retort. Honestly, there is nothing for him to say.

“Versus when normal people--or me, say--I look at Baekhyun’s work, and I see something to admire, you get me?”

“And since when did you become an art critic?” Kyungsoo leans back into his seat, throat clamming up.

“Hey,” Chanyeol says easily, pleased with himself, “Art critics don’t buy paintings, do they?”

“Chanyeol,” Kyungsoo pushes his hands over his face.

“Come on, prove me wrong, friend. Take a risk with me. When was the last time you saw an actual painting instead of a price tag?”

Kyungsoo empties his glass of wine and groans. One day, this is how the world will end, across the table from Park Chanyeol’s blinding beam.

••••••••••••

When they come out of the restaurant Kyungsoo has a tentative deal with Chanyeol. Given the right conditions, a quarter of a year from now Kyungsoo’s gallery will be a full-fledged Byun Baekhyun exhibition. The thought of it alone makes Kyungsoo want to stick his face in a blender. It’s disgusting how Chanyeol can wheedle anyone into anything.

“Make sure you invite Jongin,” Chanyeol says, smug, as his chauffeur pulls up.

“I’ll see if I can find him,” Kyungsoo says, sticking his hands in his pockets. His tie suddenly feels thick and tight around his neck, like a noose. Maybe he had too much to drink for lunch.

“You make it sound like you guys don’t keep in touch,” Chanyeol laughs.

The joke falls flat. Kyungsoo picks the inside of his pockets. The truth of the matter is that they don’t keep in touch. Years can pass without a single call. Jongin could be dead in the pit of the Grand Canyon and Kyungsoo would never know. Sometimes the only thing they’ve got left between them is these ridiculous oceans of time filled with utter silence. Jongin likes him, sure he does. In fact Jongin probably loves him more than he has the patience to reciprocate. But Jongin has never been the type to invest in things like relationship. For all Kyungsoo knows he probably thinks that even this much is a burden.

“We do,” Kyungsoo says reluctantly, “When he decides to show up.”

“Like now?” Chanyeol tilts his chin down the driveway and there Jongin is, in his old windbreaker in the dead of winter, duffle bag bumping over his shoulder as he breaks into a slow jog towards them. He looks horribly mismatched in this part of town, an extruding tack in a fine board of pressed suits and business cards sliced thin enough to cut.

“Sehun said you’d be here, hyung,” Jongin says, face breaking into a grin as he swings an arm around Kyungsoo’s shoulder. His eyes are on Kyungsoo in that way that--that makes it look as if Kyungsoo’s the only person on the street, the only person in his field of vision. It’s heavy, that gaze. There are people looking, Kyungsoo thinks, people who know him. He wonders if Jongin would notice if he shrugged his arm off.

“Yo, Jongin,” Chanyeol says, punching his shoulder, “Say hi to me too--your awesome Park Chanyeol hyung is about to invite you to a party.”

“It’s a retrospective, it’s going to bore you. Honest. You won’t like it,” Kyungsoo says quickly. Jongin’s never been sociable material, and there might be a lot of their old school contacts gathering there. Kyungsoo doesn’t want to be seen with Jongin there, doesn’t want to answer the questions and insinuations that it might stir.

“Why not? Are you going?”

“Of course he’s going, he’s throwing it,” Chanyeol quips, oblivious.

So Jongin says, “Then I’ll go,” and right, of course he would.

“That’s my man,” Chanyeol beams, laughing as he claps Jongin over the shoulder, “Lucky for you, I’ve got some spare time, you two want to catch--”

“Sorry Chanyeol, I’m running late for a meeting,” Kyungsoo says abruptly, hating himself for it because Jongin had probably spent all morning trying to find him and most of all, he doesn’t actually have a meeting. He just doesn’t want to see Jongin. Not here. Not by this crowd.

He’s in the nearest cab before either of them can protest. As they turn around the block, Kyungsoo realizes that if Jongin had asked Sehun where he was, Jongin had probably asked if he would be free after. Kyungsoo hits his head on the window.

••••••••••••

When Kyungsoo returns, Jongin is gone as if he’s never been here. His bag is nowhere to be seen, the plate that Kyungsoo had set on the table washed and returned to its spot on the dish rack. Only a speck of paint remains, on the edge of Kyungsoo’s wall.

Kyungsoo takes out his phone, wanting to call him, ask about that smudge on the wall maybe or offer up an explanation that he doesn’t have for earlier. He dials. Stops midway. The numbers tear out of the screen to glare up at him, bold accusing font.

He hits backspace, stuffs the phone back in his pocket, and drinks out of the whiskey bottle.

Tonight he sleeps in Jongin’s spot on the couch, where he can see the mark on the wall. It’s a warm shade of pumpkin orange, the color of that flower they had marked over the wall by the train station when they started dating. Kyungsoo laughs, remembering how Jongin used to call himself a bona fide renegade artist. Every time he talked about graffiti his eyes shined, even if it was in the back of the program advisor’s office, with a letter of expulsion in his hand. The first time Kyungsoo tried to understand it, it was nearly midnight, a Tuesday. Jongin couldn’t explain it, not in words, but Jongin gave him a bottle and told him to shake it.

“I don’t feel like getting arrested,” Kyungsoo had protested, squirming.

“Come on, you won’t,” Jongin said.

“I can’t. I’m going to graduate in two months.”

“All the more reason to do it. Isn’t this what being an artist means? All that stuff about defying the system? Expressing your demons?” Jongin said, and somehow Kyungsoo ended up following along. At first he’d held the nozzle too close to the wall and the color had come out in a bleeding mess over the wall, which meant Jongin had to play last minute rescue, using his fingers to streak out vines and petals out of the paint.

Kyungsoo can’t remember it anymore, exactly what kind of flowers that had bloomed under Jongin’s hands. Instead he remembers Jongin’s palm hot against his hand as he guided it over the wall. The paint had been sticky under his fingers, the wall jaded and the silence around them soft, lukewarm, elemental in the way the world had always been.

In the distance, outside the window, one orange traffic light flashes on, and off, and on. He takes another mouthful of whiskey. It tastes like that quiet tremble in Jongin’s smile when Kyungsoo turned his back on him.

Memory is a strange thing. Every time you look down the tunnel you see what you want to see, magnified and amplified, and sometimes that thing at the other end of the tunnel looks back at you.

And it tells you, it didn’t have to be this way.

••••••••••••

He wakes up on his bed. The covers have been drawn up around him, the tie loosened from his neck and his trousers stripped away. Jongin is snoring beside him, yet again, his arm curled around Kyungsoo’s waist.

Kyungsoo turns, tangling his legs between Jongin’s, and closes his eyes.

“You shouldn’t drink from the bottle,” Jongin murmurs into his collarbone, “What a waste of cat pee.”

“Okay,” Kyungsoo whispers, pressing his lips to Jongin’s head, his heart tightening. He wants to but doesn’t brace himself against the detonation, an eruption thudding into his ribs, debris swelling through and barely contained in his veins. He never does. “Okay.”

At some point he wakes again, and this time Jongin’s gone. There’s some noise coming from the kitchen, the sound of oil sizzling on the pan, water hitting the sink. Kyungsoo crawls up slowly, a crack of pain coiling in his ear and spreading slowly inside his skull. He finds a napkin on the bedstand.

It’s a monochrome watercolor of him sleeping on the bed in deep violet. His eyes are closed, mouth slightly ajar, his hair flush against his cheek. The lines are remarkably sloppy, and set with the natural ease that Kyungsoo has only ever found in Jongin.

At the foot of the bed sits a bottle of Bordeaux. Kyungsoo traces his finger over the napkin’s crease absently and scoffs. What a waste of good wine.

“Listen, about yesterday,” Kyungsoo begins as he walks into the kitchen, having no idea where he’s going with this but hoping that Jongin will have enough faith to stop him midway, “It wasn’t you. It was Chanyeol. I was just--irritated, I guess...”

Jongin doesn’t react. After noticing the earbud plugged into his ears, Kyungsoo changes his mind. Maybe he doesn’t need to go anywhere with anything; besides he’s never been one to pick open scabs. Instead he sits down at the dining table behind Jongin, unfolds the newspaper, and waits. The kitchen smells of bacon and toast and dish soap and Kyungsoo wonders if a scab is worth picking if the flesh is rotting underneath, or if happiness is commensurate only with the skin of things.

“You’re out of milk,” Jongin declares when he pulls out his headphones, pushing a plate of burnt bacon under Kyungsoo’s nose, “And I finished all the eggs.”

Kyungsoo blinks.

Jongin clarifies, “Let’s go shopping.”

It catches Kyungsoo off-guard. Jongin isn’t one to initiate, usually. Kyungsoo stares down at his plate, the wet shine of it blinding. He says, “I have some work left at the office,” voice coming out taut and forceful, more than he intended,

“It’s Saturday,” Jongin says, clearly sulking. Kyungsoo’s stomach lurches, a twist and a sinking.

“There’s some cash in the dresser,” Kyungsoo mutters, “Buy what you want. I have work.”

They aren’t in a relationship, after all. Kyungsoo owes him nothing. Each time Jongin comes back Kyungsoo is already a different person. He’s not who he was seven years ago, not the kid who fell in love with Jongin and held his hand and sat in Jongin’s spot in the sculpting studio and cried because Jongin was dropping out. It’s inconceivably stupid how Jongin can just return each time, expecting Kyungsoo to always remain the same, that twenty-two year old waiting hopelessly until morning in a dingy diner.

••••••••••••

Kyungsoo scrolls through the gallery. Left alone, it’s hard to avoid musing what a comical waste of space and electricity this is. He can imagine Sehun going home every day to prepare the ultimate memoir of his dick of a boss: the elitism, the snobbery, the greed, the true profligate unveiled, with one-on-one interviews with his equally dick best friend, Park Chanyeol, knight of Silicon Valley. It wouldn’t be unreasonable. Even now, this kind of money, Kyungsoo too, does not really--understand, if that’s the right word. Sure, he wears luxury like a glass slipper he was born into, but the reality of things is that his family had never been well-to-do. Sundays had always been spent helping his mother sweep the hair salon. This sort of recklessness had always come half a size too small, and if he touches his feet, he can still feel the phantom blisters, the bone warped and contorted within.

Kyungsoo wanders aimlessly, glancing at the displays, a few for the first time. No one is around. The janitor had turned the heat off in the adjacent offices. The place is surprisingly cold when Kyungsoo peels off his jacket, air stiff in his lungs.

But it’s been winter for a long time now, he realizes. There is snow outside clouding the city like a blast of fine asbestos. He unfastens the buttons of his shirt cuffs, rolls them up, and retrieves a broom and dustpan out of the janitor’s closet.

Jongin’s coffee, made black, has a bitter aftertaste that sticks stubbornly to his palate.

He starts at the end, the entrance to his office, and works his way back. Past the curator’s door, the regular staff’s cubicles, Sehun’s table at the very end.

Sehun’s stuff is still unpacked on his bench, the ridiculous number of organic matcha latte cartons lining the wall and candy wrappers littered over the ground, some unbecoming display of defiance. It seems he’s not going to let Kyungsoo fire him, and of course, of course he won’t. That was probably the reason why Kyungsoo had picked him out of a pool of a hundred, him and his ridiculous lack of manners and tendency to staple together all the wrong--

“Hyung!”

Kyungsoo all but drops his broom on the ground when he jerks up and catches Jongin with his face pasted up against the gallery window. Jongin’s grinning ear to ear, pleased with himself. A thin layer of snow is building on his jacket. He holds up an empty shopping bag and raps his knuckles against the glass, “I won’t be able to carry everything. Serious.”

Kyungsoo glances at the mound of garbage sitting in the dustpan and at Jongin’s small, hopeful smile, hanging haphazardly over his face.

And here is the truth of the matter: though they might not be in a relationship, Kyungsoo’s always allowed Jongin to drag him along because Kyungsoo--Kyungsoo just hasn’t learned how to let go in time. Not yet.

So he follows him. This time to the grocery store. A quick urge, always a quick urge.

••••••••••••

At the supermarket, Kyungsoo pushes the cart, chatting away mindlessly while Jongin tails him.

“Chanyeol’s eating it up,” Kyungsoo says, showing him the photo of Baekhyun’s painting Chanyeol had forwarded, “Look at this. I have to open a whole show for this.”

“It’s not so bad,” Jongin says, perusing through the archive, “Why don’t you like him? He uses good colors.”

“As far as I’m concerned, colors aren’t going to get anyone anywhere,” Kyungsoo says, “Colors are out of the market right now. This is the generation where depression is the new intelligence. Everyone wants to be miserable. Blue is the new black. You’ve heard this before, haven’t you?”

“I think good art will always sell,” Jongin shrugs, handing back the phone.

Kyungsoo pockets it and says, unthinking, “How would you know? All you do is vandalise--” and stops himself, “Trust me, I know what my clients like, and they don’t like this.”

Jongin looks at him funny for a second before turning his attention to the column of cereal boxes beside them. He stacks five family packs into the cart.

“My apartment is not a storage bin for your latest food interests,” Kyungsoo comments.

Jongin steps onto the other end of the cart, saying, “I’ll be sure to finish them before they go bad. Push me.”

And Kyungsoo wonders if Jongin means he will stay past the expiration date this time, at least, and pushes him and the cart full of cereal forward.

••••••••••••

They walk back home together. Jongin doesn’t want to take the car so Kyungsoo leaves it parked by the sidewalk. The snow has grown heavier, giant flakes floating down like cotton balls. Kyungsoo watches them land on Jongin’s hair as Jongin steps onto a patch of ice and slides through sideways, one hand thrust into his trouser pockets and the other dangling a grocery bag for balance. He looks deceptively boyish, in a way that he’s never quite seemed before.

Jongin waits for Kyungsoo to catch up. When he does, they walk side by side, shoulders bumping. Next to Jongin, Kyungsoo feels an age gap much greater than a year. When they were nineteen, they celebrated their birthday together--and at that time Kyungsoo felt as if Jongin was ancient, all rock and sinew under an impenetrable laugh. Then, at twenty-four, years after Jongin dropped out of college just days before graduation, Jongin finally turned nineteen, reckless and terrifying and young. And now, Kyungsoo looks at him and he says, “It’s funny, I can’t remember how old you are.”

“That would be because I’m immortal,” Jongin replies, pleased with himself.

Kyungsoo elbows Jongin, “Jesus, grow up.”

“Well, I don’t know, I mean, I’ll never be as old as you anyway, gramps,” Jongin says while making a face. Kyungsoo promptly drops his bags and grabs a fistful of snow and stuffs it down Jongin’s shirt, laughing as Jongin screams and tackles him back.

Two hours later, their jackets are damp over the shoulder and their shoes soggy. As Kyungsoo goes to the bathroom to fetch towels, Jongin follows him blindly while ruffling the water out of his hair with both hands.

“Your hair’s gotten long again,” Kyungsoo observes.

Jongin is standing by the window again, his shirt stripped off and his feet bare. A small puddle builds under him, the water soaking into the edge of his jeans. He looks at Kyungsoo and smiles lazily, “You could cut it for me.”

“Or you could go to a stylist,” Kyungsoo says.

Jongin waits until Kyungsoo is by his side before saying, “But I like it better when you do it.”

Outside there is Seoul the metropolis at large, miles and miles of skyscrapers into the sky and a giant tsunami of cement. Closer, just under, young oaks line the street, each guarding a small block of the sidewalk. They are naked, their skin cracked and peeling. Cigarette butts and loose paper fliers, buried under blackened snow, sparsely populate the pedestrian streets alongside the anonymous masses. All the street lamps have flickered on. Coffee shops glow in the blackening street corners.

Kyungsoo takes a lock of Jongin’s hair in his palm. He spreads it between his fingers. It’s wet and slippery and coarse. The air is hot in his lungs, his heart a rabbit’s. Slowly, Jongin’s hand wraps around his wrist. The thumb and forefinger at first, then the palm flattening against his skin. Kyungsoo watches Jongin tug his hand to his lips, watches Jongin’s mouth pressing into his knuckles, into the back of his hand, the downturned bend of his wrist, the inside of his forearm, hilt of his shoulder. He shivers, but he doesn’t resist.

Jongin rests his chin on Kyungsoo’s shoulder. Kyungsoo studies his lips, the edge of his teeth and tongue, in the dimness of the hallway light. Jongin’s eyes are heavy in his own, and he knows that Jongin is waiting, can hear him breathing, feel his heartbeat, his fingers unyielding around his wrist.

“Kiss me,” Jongin whispers.

Unthinking, Kyungsoo leans in, utterly blind with his eyes open. He kisses Jongin’s lower lip first, chaste, his upper lip the same. Then Jongin runs his thumb over Kyungsoo’s mouth, coaxing it open. Kyungsoo sucks on it, hollows his cheeks in around it and licks all of its crevices and Jongin pushes him back, until he’s almost certain he’s going to trip over--something--and then he hits the wall. Somehow Jongin’s got his trousers unbuckled already, and he’s breathing heavy as Jongin drops between his legs, one arm holding him to the wall, the other pushing down his briefs.

Jongin sucks him off like that, his trousers rough over his thighs, palms wet and sticky and hot on the back of Jongin’s head, a strangled moan caught in his throat.

••••••••••••

They don’t make it to the bed. Jongin fucks him on a chair in the dining room instead, its metal legs scraping and thudding and skidding over the floor, the lights dark, Jongin’s hands like stone around his thigh. The sound their clothes wrinkling, breaths quickening, bodies kneading into each other fills the corridors to the brim and over. Jongin comes inside of him, with his hand around Kyungsoo’s cock and lips to Kyungsoo’s forehead.

Kyungsoo lets his hands slide down Jongin’s back. As the air drains out of him, he wonders if he should tell Jongin, and he should.

“I missed you,” Jongin says.

Then, Kyungsoo can’t make a single noise.

••••••••••••

Sehun is in his usual spot in the office when Kyungsoo arrives the next morning, casually flipping through a magazine like Kyungsoo didn’t already fire him three times in the past month.

“You’re still here,” Kyungsoo comments, “Funny. I recall telling you to pack it up.”

Sehun nods vaguely without bothering to look up, “Absolutely hilarious, sir.”

“Get me a coffee,” Kyungsoo says, “Two spoons of sugar.”

Sehun mutters, attention still pinned on a photospread, “First of all, you missed a spot on your neck.”

Kyungsoo looks in the nearest decorative mirror and finds a dabble of red near his collarbone. He quickly readjusts his scarf, trying for nonchalance.

“I don’t get you two,” Sehun says, finally sitting up straight and studying Kyungsoo through his reflection in the mirror.

What he doesn’t know is, neither does Kyungsoo.

••••••••••••

“Oh, Sehun.”

“That’s not even a joke,” Sehun says.

“It’s a pun.”

“It’s totally not a pun. I have a degree in Korean Literature. I so know.”

Kyungsoo slams a stack of papers down in front of Sehun’s nose. Jongin jumps so hard from the noise he nearly falls off of his stool. A room across, the two college interns glance at them and at each other and giggle.

“You listen to Girls Generation. That nullifies your degree in anything.”

Sehun’s busy turning red when Kyungsoo turns to his defense, “Wasn’t there a guy dancing to Girls Generation in the public bath the other day?”

Jongin smile downturns with embarrassment, “No--”

“Uh-oh,” Sehun says, smug, “Here comes Kyungsatan.”

Kyungsoo pets Jongin’s hair lovingly despite Jongin’s attempts to shrug him off, “I only tolerate him. Half of him.”

“Because he’s madly in love with the other,” Jongin dubs, and Kyungsoo kicks the stool out from underneath him. From the hallway, Chanyeol pokes his head in and howls with laughter like he’s ready to die any minute, heaving and pounding on the door and everything. Kyungsoo takes the sight in. Little has changed in these years that they’d known each other. It’s still the four of them; Sehun’s still fighting Jongin, and Jongin will always have his hand hooked lazily in Kyungsoo’s pocket, and Chanyeol is forever trying to boost his friend points indiscriminately entertaining everything he hears.

“Don’t be delusional,” Sehun corrects, “Some poor girl’s already put a ring on this one.”

Then the smile freezes on Jongin’s face and Chanyeol’s laugh dies into an echo and Kyungsoo feels it. He feels everything changing. Just a slight crack.

“What?” Jongin says. And it all crumbles.

“Ah,” Sehun says, looking at Kyungsoo. The blood drains out of his face in a flash. “No, god, aha, I meant--”

The first time he invited Jongin to his apartment was probably the only time Kyungsoo ever took the initiative. He’d misdiagnosed Jongin’s quiet exterior for rationality; Jongin had been a recluse, local celebrity, top of his class, and Kyungsoo thought that gaining an acquaintance like him would benefit him in the long run. After all, if things were to fall asunder, he could always leave. He was wrong.

“Which one?” Jongin claps Kyungsoo on the waist, too hard, “This one? A girl's put a ring on Kyungsoo?”

“It’s a joke,” Chanyeol cuts in, too quickly, “Sehun was joking.”

That day Korea was playing Japan on TV. Kyungsoo had been sitting on the couch with a beer and Jongin perched on a stool by the counter beside his cereal. Eventually Kyungsoo ended up trading in his beer for Jongin’s cereal, because honestly he’d never liked beer to begin with and Jongin was so damned noisy with his cereal. They shared a bowl and spoon since Kyungsoo only had tableware for one: One bowl. One plate. One fork. One chair. Jongin threw his arm around Kyungsoo’s neck between the rerun of the first and second season, thawing into a pulp of bones and lethargy, a weight that was surprising and that Kyungsoo thought he could get used to. Maybe. Around then, Kyungsoo thinks, is when he began really--wanting--

“A ring, huh,” Jongin says, his voice growing lower. A smile is beginning to stretch over his lips again.

“Wait, Christ, Jongin, that’s not what I said!” Sehun yells with both hands up, like he’s surrendering.

It wasn’t remarkable. He put his arm down and it landed on Jongin’s wrist, and Jongin did not move away. There were no confessions or prolonged glances, nothing particular to reminisce about. Still, like a great piece of art, a Dali or a Picasso, what it left behind was not the image but the impression, the lingering glimmer of--

“Hyung, you got me,” Jongin turns to Kyungsoo, suddenly laughing.

He sounds so damned desperate.

Kyungsoo takes a step back. He can’t hear himself breathing. He sees the interns in the backroom, the regular staff in the parking lot, discussing dinner and decor, sees the snow, globs of it, piling down on the ground like it’s ready to suffocate the life out of anything in its way. Everything is so fucking cold all of a sudden.

But he can fix this. He can laugh it off. He can fight Jongin, and not resist.

He doesn't.

“No, I’ve been seeing a woman, until you came back.”

Kyungsoo doesn't realize he's been holding his breath until he gasps for it.

••••••••••••

Four weeks pass since Jongin disappears, all of him, and the world stays the same. Of course. No surprises here.

Kyungsoo goes home. He doesn’t drink or think, doesn’t allow himself to. He cleans the whole apartment, corner to corner, every inch of the windows and every nook of the cabinets, until the whole place is spick and span, so clean it could be bulletproof and Jongin could really be gone.

When he sees something on the wall, he does everything over again.

It’s not that Kyungsoo doesn’t love Jongin. He loves Jongin, God, he loves him so much. Hard enough to go nights without sleep, so deeply he loses his breath. Only not always, because Jongin--Jongin is not something he understands, nothing he can claim to know, and probably, likewise, not the right decision.

The times it doesn’t work out, Jongin abandons it, leaves it to dry. Afterwards he comes back and paints over it. Bright hues, soft and supple, charming when he wants it to be, like the very core of a dream. But memories aren’t written down on the side of a train or warehouse. Memory smears. Memory stains. Memory tears, infects, destroys. Memory is a pond of dead water, a thin gloss of promise made to falter. And when you dip yourself in that pond, you’ll find that it’s turned black with all the fucking paint you’ve poured in, from all those times you’ve tried to restart, all those abandoned beginnings.

At the end of the day, Kyungsoo thinks, maybe it was impossible to love Jongin after the first time they screwed up.

••••••••••••

“Baekhyun is going to fly over in seven weeks,” Junmyeon relays over speakerphone.

“Recatalogue his pieces,” Kyungsoo orders Sehun.

Shrug. “I already did it.”

“Do it again.”

“Here,” Sehun hands him a business card, “This is a pretty decent bar.”

Kyungsoo frowns. It misses the garbage can by an inch.

••••••••••••

  
  


The light turns green. A group of late-night club hoppers crosses the street. Kyungsoo watches them from inside the cab, through the condensation clouding the window, taps his watch and matches their steps to the beat of the hockey commentator’s words playing from the radio. His head is pounding. The driver turns right, passing two blocks before pulling up the curb. In December, Seoul is unbearably cold.

A man walks by the cab in a coat with the collars popped up. It reminds Kyungsoo of Chanyeol.

“Ever heard of the concept of perspectives?” Chanyeol had said, a long time ago, back when Jongin first started disappearing. It was four weeks after Kyungsoo convinced his father to loan him a sum to open the gallery. “It’s like you see things differently, you know? Give you two the same painting, what would you say?”

“Chanyeol, you can’t compare us like that. He writes graffiti, for fuck sake--he thinks he’s a True Artist.”

“Point is, I’ve got two friends who graduated top of their class from K Arts--or, one who did and one who almost did--and instead of painting or sculpting like any sane person would expect them to do, one is trading art and the other is doodling on subway trains.”

“So what?”

“All right, shut up a second. Let me talk,” Chanyeol had said, “Jongin can do whatever he wants with a paintbrush and a canvas and be praised to hell for it, but he doesn’t, because he likes to push himself into a corner--and it isn’t courage so much as it is his being terrified of failing in everything else.”

"That’s not--”

“And you know why it doesn’t work out? Because while he’s escaping the rest of his life, you pretend to not care.” Chanyeol said, “You let him come back, but you don’t stop him when he leaves. You’re both just cowards.”

“Say that again, Park Chanyeol.”

“I’m saying, you’re a coward. You’re just like him,” Chanyeol had said with the light snuffed out of his eyes. A thick rush of rage had stormed through Kyungsoo’s body right then, the wine glass hard in his grasp, his dress shirt like a knife against his throat. His head had hurt, his heart a tight squeeze in his chest.

It was only time they’d ever fought, really fought. Kyungsoo didn’t talk to him for months. When Chanyeol finally showed up to his door with a bottle of warm sake and two packs of roasted squid, Kyungsoo tore everything out of his memory. Every word Chanyeol had ever said.

The cab stops in front of his apartment. Kyungsoo counts out exact change. It takes him a while. All the coins look the same. He shakes open an umbrella as he steps out. He’s not supposed to be here right now. There is a flight to Hong Kong four hours gone, and that’s where he’s supposed to be, formatting table-sizes on his laptop, organizing all the words in his dictionary to best butter up Huang Zitao and his entourage. But instead of the airport he’d gone to the bar and kissed the woman who’d bought him a drink too many.

The wind cuts over his face. He should probably shower, he thinks. The leathery scent of sex is cloying in his mouth. If he weren’t so drunk, he would have—

His phone rings. He doesn’t pick it up. The elevator door opens. He stumbles inside, then outside. Down the hallway. Locks the door behind himself, kicks off his shoes and tugs off his necktie, tossing it anywhere as the door shuts behind him. It’s been a while since he felt like this. The clock on the counter flashes 3AM.

There is a voice message on his phone.

“ _Hyung, it’s me_ ,” The static says, “ _Can you pick me up? I’m at the train station. Hurry. It’s cold. Please come._ ”

And now they’re washing back again, Chanyeol’s words, a giant hurricane of it, sinking into his ears, filling his mouth, tearing open the crevices of his skin. Kyungsoo is miserable, Kyungsoo is sad, Kyungsoo is a wee coward.

And the thing is, Chanyeol isn’t all wrong. He isn’t wrong in the least.

Kyungsoo stumbles to the entrance, tugs on his shoes. Then he’s gone.

* * *

Kyungsoo finds him on a bench in the middle of the station. The lights are dimmed, nothing but ruin at their touch: loose litter and baggage tags swept wall to wall, the vestigial bone and sinew of a ghost town. He slides into an empty seat a row behind Jongin. It presses up cold through his trousers. He waits, staring blankly at the back of Jongin’s head. All the alcohol has left in its wake is a tense, clammy shadow impossible to shake.

After a while Jongin says, “I’m hungry.”

“Hungry, huh,” Kyungsoo echoes. His voice comes out nasally, probably because he’d fallen asleep in the cab.

“I’m seriously starving,” Jongin exclaims. The words thunder down the corridors, past the train tracks and back, washing up in vanishing multiples. Kyungsoo separates all the syllables, cuts away the ones that make sense from the endless doubles, flips them inside out and tastes them on his tongue. Exhaustion hits him like a stone wall. He grimaces.

“When was the last time you ate?”

Jongin hunches over, head lolling. “Are you still angry with me?”

“I’m not.”

“You sure?”

Kyungsoo inhales. Stale air sinks into his lungs. “There’s a late-night noodle shop on 4th. My treat.”

Jongin doesn't respond, but when he turns around, he is smiling like they’re at the loneliest place in the world. Kyungsoo can hear his duffel bag brushing against his side. For a second he pictures himself reaching out towards Jongin. He can feel Jongin’s cheeks in his palms. Jongin, warm to the touch. Jongin, brutally fierce. Jongin, damning with all the feral lick of youth, so cruel and so genuine. Jongin, Jongin, Jongin. It scares him.

“I was hoping you’d at least be angry,” he says, standing to face Kyungsoo.

Kyungsoo laughs, too rough. “Let’s hurry. The cab I called might have left already.” He holds out his hand. Jongin’s arm latches around his elbow. Now, eyes closed, Kyungsoo only sees the two of them standing on opposite banks of a river, watching listlessly as life passes between them. In his head Jongin is still Jongin, like he will always be, but with time Kyungsoo will wither, wrinkle, and waste away, maybe into the river, maybe into the air. And Jongin will never know, because Jongin can never age, will never understand this kind of death.

••••••••••••

“What are you, hungover?”

“I don’t get drunk.”

Kicking away a pebble, Jongin says, “Sorry, I guess. I’m sorry I left.”

“That’s not like you.”

“Really,” Jongin protests, “I’m sorry. I thought about things. I thought that I’d like it if you did get married.”

Kyungsoo shifts his weight onto one leg, uncomfortable, “Yeah?”

“You know, it’s okay if you move on. It’s all right. You should do it. So long as I still get that spot on your couch. You know, twenty, fifty years from now. Or just… any couch of yours, anything beside you, where I can get a view of you drinking cat pee in the--ah, I’m bad at this,” he laughs, too loud again.

“Yeah,” Kyungsoo mumbles, picking at the lint lining the side of his pocket.

“But,” Jongin muses, “A family would be nice, wouldn’t it? I guess everyone has to settle down, right?”

“They do.”

“You’re the family type anyway. You’ll spoil your kids when they’re young and when they’re teenagers you’ll keep them up to three in the morning with your nagging, and when they’re old you’ll gather all the mini Kyungsoos together and have a spread for Christmas, and nag their children until three in the morning, too.”

“Right.”

Jongin inhales. Kyungsoo exhales, glancing at Jongin. Jongin can’t see it but Kyungsoo’s fingers quiver inside his pockets. His chest crumbles with a dampened sob. Suddenly his whole world is falling apart, brick by brick, atom by atom, the sky peeling away, air curdling, all of it eclipsed just behind the projection of reality Jongin dwells in, stagnant and quiet and ever undisturbed.

Chanyeol said once that a fight would fix this. “That’s what normal couples do, you know? They fight to protect what’s between them. But you and Jongin don’t fight. All you ever do is sit around and wait for time to heal all wounds.” Kyungsoo didn’t tell Chanyeol that time doesn’t heal scars, and that that was the only thing left between the two of them. They’d run their course dying a long, petty, insignificant death. In retrospect, he should have said something. It might have changed something.

By the time they make it to the noodle place, Jongin’s run out of things to confess.

“Hello,” the waitress asks, “For two?”

Jongin nods in the affirmative.

“I’m not eating,” Kyungsoo corrects.

She directs them to the bar, where Jongin takes the seat at the end. Kyungsoo passes him the menu and watches him read. He wonders if Jongin realizes that he’s mapped out a future and that Jongin’s not a part of it.

“Hey,” Jongin says, hastily swallowing a mouthful of soup, “You know that spot by that abandoned train station near the northern side? We went like two months before your graduation, and we painted this giant thing of flowers down one side of the wall... remember that? We called it our magnum opus, remember? I chanced upon it a couple days ago, so I left you something there. I know I really haven’t given you much, but,” Jongin says, fast and loud, like he’s fighting the void between them, “You should go see it, when you get the time. I think you’ll like—”

“Jongin,” Kyungsoo says quietly. He stares, unthinking, at his hands, at the ugly fate lines sectioning them into pieces. He turns them over. “Jongin, this is enough. You can stop.”

Jongin stops. The silence quakes between them.

“This is the last time. Do you get it? I—” Kyungsoo keeps his voice low. He’s completely numb, barely hearing himself over the enormous drone of white noise in his head, a thousand fists slamming into a piano, bass like the sky ripping or the heart currently tearing itself in half in his chest. “It’s always me waiting for you,” and his ears are ringing, and he is so utterly worn out, lungs collapsing on themselves, “I, Jongin, listen, I--”

“Hy--” Jongin’s voice snaps. Reconnects on a different pitch. “--ung, I’m sorry, hyung.”

“I’m sorry,” Jongin repeats, more clearly. It’s probably the only thing he knows how to say, and Kyungsoo can’t blame him. Times like this, Jongin’s like a five year old. Sorry is the only thing he knows. Sorry and fear and rejection.

Only at some point, sorry just isn’t enough anymore.

“I get it. I get that you’re sorry. But if I have kids, I don’t think I’ll want them to meet you. Do you understand? It’s not about how sorry you are... sorry doesn’t fix things. This is the end. I’ve thought about it when you were gone. That whole time, I thought about what I can do about us, what we can do about us. And I realized we can’t do anything.”

“That’s not true, hyung, it’s not true and you--”

“I can give you back that couch. If you want, I can have it delivered,” Kyungsoo says. Everything falls into place. He cleans up the mess in his head and categorizes what he needs to say, wants to say, and should say. “You should finish your noodles. Don’t waste food.”

Slowly, Jongin picks up his chopsticks again. He’s quiet now. Kyungsoo doesn’t look at him, but Kyungsoo can see him carefully lining their tips against his palm, and then dipping them into the bowl. Jongin continues eating, at the same pace, only he’s not talking anymore.

“I’m sorry, too,” Kyungsoo says, finally.

“Hyung,” Jongin replies, his voice shaking and so tiny, “Goddamn it, these noodles are so salty.”

Kyungsoo slides off his seat. He leaves behind more than enough to cover the tip and two bottles of liquor, and he leaves Jongin facing the counter, each step forward a fall towards the center of earth, a tumbling off of his axis. His mouth is dry and his head utterly blank. When did winters get so cold?

Glancing back, he catches a blurred image of Jongin’s hunched back through the glass, like a disconnected memory, something he was never able to touch despite all the years between them.

So, Kyungsoo thinks, this is how it ends.

This is how it ends, a whimper not half enough.

••••••••••••

A week later, Christmas. Chanyeol comes around, drags Kyungsoo and the fiancée to a handful of holiday dinners and then to Chanyeol’s parents, where a tribe of tall people take turns grilling Kyungsoo over his future. Kyungsoo opts out by emptying the wine and requesting to be driven home a quarter way into dinner.

In the car, he’s barely conscious enough to hear Chanyeol whine, “I’ve never seen you like this.”

“Shut up, I’ll actually throw up on your new seat cushions.”

“I don’t get it, man, it’s just a relationship. Shit happens.”

Kyungsoo turns, fighting the seat belt. Half of him tells himself that Chanyeol’s right, it was just a relationship, and the other half of him laughs, because "just a relationship" can’t account for half of his life. Between Jongin and him was second year in art school, was Jongin hiding under Kyungsoo’s ceramics table after spray-painting a mess onto the side of the administrative building, was Kyungsoo glancing out the dorm window and finding his face painted onto the billboard under a ridiculous crown of flowers. Between them were all the times Kyungsoo showed up to all of Jongin’s classes to take his notes and watched Jongin turn down gallery offers because he didn’t believe in selling his art and listened to Jongin’s tiny and disembodied voice on the other end of the pay phone, talking about how he didn’t want to make This Kind of Art, and finding him in the diner, at four in the morning, paying his tab and carrying him home. All those times he’d thought about him, stayed up worrying for him all night, so fucking much that he couldn’t work--they can’t be simplified so conveniently into a relationship. It was more than a relationship. Kyungsoo wants to believe that. And had Jongin ever changed, perhaps Kyungsoo could convince himself that it wasn’t a simple relationship he’d found in Jongin.

But a quarter of a decade later, it was still Kyungsoo waiting for Jongin in his car, still Kyungsoo trying to introduce him to potential clients, always Kyungsoo scrubbing the paint out of Jongin’s arms at four in the morning under a shower tap that would only run cold water in the middle of December. Always. There had been ten--eleven--maybe more--it’s hard to count--years between them. If he is honest to himself, Kyungsoo can’t remember how many times they’d broken up in between. How many nights he’d stayed up wondering if Jongin was going to show up after all. Like the scream Baekhyun had printed onto his canvas, those trite pay-phone conversations, reductive bell tolls, their weights like pendulums, run circles back to the origin.

Or rather they simply never left the starting point. Perhaps they aren't so much in a relationship as a habit.

••••••••••••

Without Jongin, life makes more sense. Kyungsoo works, he sleeps. Time kisses his palms and exits by his fingertips. His ties are rolled up perfectly in his closet, his watches lined parallel in the drawers. His plates and utensils are where Jongin had stacked them the last time he ventured to do the dishes. Kyungsoo leaves them be. Winter thaws away like it had never been, each day a degenerate clone frozen between the color-blocked memos on his phone.

His mother calls him one night. She talks about his dad, their house, the weather. She tells him she misses him. He says he will visit soon. She says he hasn’t gone home in four and a half years. It's true.

In the blink of an eye, Junmyeon has already escorted Baekhyun from the airport to the hotel and into the conference room. Kyungsoo wines and dines and befriends him, if only superficially. Baekhyun is noisy when he laughs. They’ll have to teach him not to smile like he’s teething, Kyungsoo thinks as he seats Baekhyun in his office. It’ll scare away the buyers.

“What do you think?” Baekhyun asks, a spark in his eyes which Kyungsoo doesn’t find unfamiliar, two works into his portfolio.

Smiling blandly, Kyungsoo recites, “I think the subaqueous qualities of the motifs spatially contextualizes the exploration of montage elements.”

“Hey, we both wrote our fair share of papers in art school,” Baekhyun says, “Don’t you sprout this academic drivel with me.”

Oddly enough, Kyungsoo recalls hearing something similar from Jongin once. He studies the empty price tags on Baekhyun’s painting, traces his finger over the edge of his phone, and reminds himself that Jongin’s gone. Goodbye, goodbye goodbye goodbye, goodbye Jongin, goodbye.

••••••••••••

When he goes home, he loosens his tie and doesn’t take off his shoes before falling into bed.

It might be just the delirium or fatigue, but Kyungsoo thinks his sheets are warm, like someone’s slept in them just minutes before. In a flash, he’s pulled himself up and turned the apartment upside-down looking for even a trace of what he knows better than to want.

And it’s not there, not even a trace.

Kyungsoo doesn’t know how and doesn’t care but for the next thirteen hours he’s punching blood into the shower walls, and then suddenly he’s not engaged anymore.

He listens to the empty dial tone breaking into the porcelain and the sanded glass. Through the invisible fences, between the curling flower spaces, Kyungsoo can see his past unwinding. He thinks, that wasn’t the end at the noodle shop. That couldn’t have been the end in Chanyeol’s car. This is the end, and this is just beginning; the fall, apart.

••••••••••••

Within two months, Kyungsoo opens all doors for Baekhyun. Lines are drawn at 500,000₩, incrementing up based on projected reception. Kyungsoo and a couple of oldboys finalize the numbers between themselves. All’s set until Baekhyun decides he doesn’t agree with the numbers. “This is just paint and canvas,” he says.

“Right,” Kyungsoo echoes.

Baekhyun frowns, confused, “But I made these with my own hands. I know how much they’re worth, and I’m just saying, I don’t want them to be dragged into this ridiculous thing.”

Kyungsoo feels a headache splitting into his temple. He puts his phone down on the table, tells Sehun to fetch him a coffee, black, piping hot.

“Fine, you’re right,” he replies quietly, studying a smudge on the side of his hand. “But how much is it worth? Ten pounds? A hundred pounds? Or perhaps it’s priceless, belongs as easily in the showrooms of Tate’s as in the forgotten storage of a car garage? If priceless is human expression, Van Gogh in the depth of despair, the first joyed dip of Picasso’s brush in paint; priceless then must be your art. Your true art, exempt from our mechanical, alienating, primitive greed and vanity. So you’ll call this gallery off, resell at a dime a dozen to pure aficionados. Only then, people will recognize the true value of your pieces as you see them. They will purchase your art and will appreciate it for what it is at its core, not what it is as I tell them it is. Oh, yes, all those middle-class intellectuals who eat up those fake Warhol’s because they are so touched by the man’s artistic integrity, and those cultural critics who gather en masse buttering up Koff’s rear because they can’t deny their inner calling, they too, will be astounded by your talent even without all these ‘ridiculous things’. On the street corners of London, these Prince Charmings will take your dirt-cheap painting and they will pick it apart from some talentless old maid’s rubbish at the spread beside yours, and they will think this is true art. This is priceless expression.”

Kyungsoo touches the side of the painting and hums, softly, “Go on, do it. Quit. Save yourself from this absurdity. And maybe you, too, can go and spray-paint the buildings and trains for a living.”

Baekhyun’s lower lip trembles. “I thought we were friends,” he says.

••••••••••••

Here’s the dream that Kyungsoo had, the night he found Jongin in the train station:

Kyungsoo sat at the cusp of a great precipice, Jongin by his side. They were there to paint the cliff. A breeze came, stirring sand and dust. The gravel gathered over Jongin’s canvas and, when the breeze returned, it lifted off with all the colors beneath it. The paint had emulsified with the sand into a gossamer rainbow.

They watched as the rainbow snapped and drifted in the wind. While Kyungsoo went breathless at the sight, sweat filling his shirt and terror a thin glass veneer over his lungs, Jongin reached out easily to catch the rainbow. It lingered transiently in his hands before floating away.

“Don’t chase it,” Kyungsoo warned, “Don’t move.” Jongin didn’t listen. He followed it absently towards the cliff, where chunks of dirt and stone crumbled down in warning. Again, Kyungsoo warned him. He grabbed Jongin by the wrist and jerked him back. Jongin’s skin felt like leather and Kyungsoo was beginning to wonder why when—without warning—a rumble clapped from deep within the earth. A chasm opened below Jongin’s feet, the dark line of the abyss below a fate line splitting open.

Jongin’s fall played out in slow motion: his arm tensing, hair plastered against his face as he turned, eyes widening just as they disappeared behind the cliff and—

All that was left of Jongin was a dead weight clamped around Kyungsoo’s wrist, dragging him closer and closer towards the teeth of the abyss. “Don’t let me go,” Jongin begged.

Kyungsoo tried to pull Jongin up, God, he tried, teeth clenched and dirt pressing into his exposed stomach. He tried so hard it felt as if his soul was tearing, but it wasn’t enough. Jongin slipped. Even as Kyungsoo was pulled half-way over the cliff, head dangling mid-air, he just kept on slipping.

The only thing Kyungsoo understood was the sweat cooling on his back, the sand clogging his ears, Jongin’s pleas slurred into a wail of white noise, and fear like knives in his guts. Kyungsoo was afraid. He was afraid of the cliff, that pitch-dark mouth of the unknown, so when Jongin dragged him nearly almost over the edge, he let go.

He let Jongin go, but it wasn’t Jongin who fell. It was him.

Kyungsoo fell with dread igniting at his feet, cold and weightless, crawling up his legs, around his torso, until it swallowed him, turned him inside out and back again, blind, deaf, mute to all but the thought that, all along, he was the one hanging over the abyss. He fell and fell. Even as he hit rock bottom and opened his eyes with that sharp breath of consciousness, he did not wake.

In the cab, the chill of winter had stretched taut. Kyungsoo exhaled, wide-eyed. He wanted to touch the tears on his cheeks. But his watch was heavy and his suit was stiff and, the fact of the matter was, there were no tears on his cheeks to begin with. He hadn't cried. He couldn’t cry. Probably, after spending so many years falling through the metaphysical abyss, he’d forgotten how to cry.

As they pulled to a stop in front of the train station, Kyungsoo looked out into the night. He saw again that image of the paint crumbling and lifting off of Jongin’s canvas. It blinded him, left a phantom bruise on his wrist which he carefully covered with his new Rolex.

••••••••••••

“WHAT IS THIS,” Baekhyun yells, his voice thundering down the hallway minutes before he tears through door. It’s been a week since opening day. A dozen Size 25’s have been sold.

“It’s a reasonable offer, is what it is,” Kyungsoo says, a put-upon sigh through the nose. He rummages through the stacks of letters Sehun had piled on his desk. “Besides, you look like you’ll be needing a new jacket. Seoul can be cold in the—"

Baekhyun's fist is a wall of steel connecting to his jaw. It honest to god takes the air out of him. Kyungsoo wheels backwards, fire on his lip. The ring on Baekhyun’s finger feels like cement against his teeth. Baekhyun grabs him by the collar before Kyungsoo can move back, and he punches him again, and again.

Kyungsoo stops reacting. He loses motivation, fists Baekhyun’s shirt, and lets him go at it.

Minutes later, when Baekhyun finally lets go, Kyungsoo’s head is ringing. A festive spray of stars lingers in his vision. He can barely make out the shadow under Baekhyun’s mouth darkening and swelling.

“You know what? I thought about what you said, and I realized that I can guarantee my own shit,” Baekhyun says, “I’d rather starve to death in a dump of shitty art than be justified by these… these fucking stacks of fucking certificates.” He picks one up from the floor and glances through it, “Goddamn it,” he mutters, before tossing it anywhere and storming out.

“So I suppose,” Chanyeol begins later, leaning on the door frame. Kyungsoo supposes he ought to justify this thing with him collapsed against the table and paperwork spilt all over the floor, if only for propriety’s sake, but he can’t find the energy to care. “You want to tell me what happened.”

“Business,” Kyungsoo shrugs, pulling the handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbing it on the blood running down his nose.

Chanyeol straightens up. Kyungsoo can’t see him well from this angle, but he imagines that if he could, he’d see Chanyeol disappointed for the first time.

“I heard what you said to him, the other day, about the prices. And I just think you--Kyungsoo, we used to fish together. Do you remember that? You used to collect all those money-saving recipes and make pollock soup all day because that was what was cheapest, you used to be so weird and funny and mean and we used to be friends,” Chanyeol says, quietly, after a while. “I miss that. I miss your soup. Did you know that? I miss you, Kyungsoo.”

“Don’t be sentimental,” Kyungsoo scoffs. He digs through the mess inside his cabinet and finally fishes out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. Chanyeol doesn’t glance back at him before he leaves, the door hanging open behind him, a question.

Kyungsoo manages a light, only his hand shakes so hard he can’t bring it to the cigarette. He tosses the dud across the table and stands, staring at Baekhyun’s genius fucking painting. The scar across the canvas. How clever, and how stupid.

Picking up the phone, Kyungsoo dials the last number he’d called.

Jongin doesn’t pick up. Kyungsoo rings again. No answer, nothing. He rings again, again, again, trembling with desperation, until the numbers on the screen look loud and foreign. Steadily, Kyungsoo begins waking to the idea that he feels relieved. This is the way things have been, and this is the way things will always be. It’s easy, so straight-cut and simple. He should’ve seen it coming.

On the first day of spring, Kyungsoo cries for the first time in years. This is how Do Kyungsoo’s life falls apart, no bangs, no whimpers, just the automated message at the end of twenty missed calls.

••••••••••••

Sehun sends him a text message.

“I quit, starting today,” it says.

The text glows but doesn't register. Kyungsoo struggles to make sense of the disconnect gaping between his head and his eyes. And after he finally types out a response, he deletes the whole thing because his hands are trembling too hard under the crushing inertia of the phone and the words look less like words and more the shavings of a desperate shell of a human shaking apart and he's not that, he's not desperate, he's not falling apart.

“Give me a reason,” he finally manages.

“I liked working for Do Kyungsoo. I worked with him for four years. But I don’t like working for you.”

Kyungsoo’s eyes swell in their sockets. The office is starting to resemble that train station--the cement lighting, the awful, frigid silence. Except this time it isn’t Jongin who’s in the center of that endless desolation. He feels panic wash cold through his guts, undoing him stitch by stitch, every seam he’d drawn closed and shut himself under these long years. Without thinking he deletes the whole thread. Deletes every thread in his inbox. Wipes out his logs, erases all the photos, all the things weighing him down.

After that, life winds down to a stop. He doesn’t work, doesn’t sleep. Time sinks past his skin, into his bones, where it sediments and hardens. Everything begins unfurling, the endless neon memos tacked on his door, the names he doesn’t recognize, the art he sells and doesn’t understand. Every grain of routine previously lodged in the organized crevices of his skin sediments. Hardens.

••••••••••••

On a side table in front of his apartment, Kyungsoo empties out his pockets. There’s his wallet, a coffee receipt, some change, and finally his flat key, which he hasn’t seen in—how many days, specifically, he can’t remember. The flat is pristine as he’d left it, some odd, synthetic collage of belongings Kyungsoo can only recognize in pieces but not together. He studies it from the entrance and turns instead for the bank.

He arrives in a Mercedes, walks with Armani on his shoulders, bypasses the winding line directly into a private office, where the banker treats him like an old friend. Privilege comes easily when passion and expression are just a thin shields over business, where art is only important on pink slips. This is what letting Jongin down senior year of college had rewarded him: cars, apartments, expensive wall décor, and the smiles of strangers. It had been worth it, for a while.

“What can I do for you today?” The banker asks.

Kyungsoo takes out enough money for down-payment on a condo and buys a bus ticket.

It’s Sunday. There is a driver in the front and a middle-aged man in the back, wearing a cheap jacket worn thin. Kyungsoo sits near the middle.

Back in college, when Jongin had moved out of dorms to room with Kyungsoo, they rode this line all the time. From the bridge by the mart to college, or past that, to the karaoke place that Chanyeol used as a leverage to hit on girls. Once, when they got off a stop just before college, they ran into Kyungsoo’s father.

“And who’s this?” he’d asked.

Without thinking, Kyungsoo had said, “Oh, just a friend.”

That was the first time Jongin left. He came back the next morning, before Kyungsoo woke up, but Kyungsoo could smell the draft, metallic on his windbreaker, and see the wind-chafed pink in his cheeks. Kyungsoo kissed his freezing cold fingers and told Jongin he loved him so much, so much, and it was true. In response Jongin told Kyungsoo he didn’t want to stick with the curriculum anymore. It was restricting. He hated writing papers. Hated the professors.

“So what would you rather do?”

“Street art. I want to write graffiti. I've been doing it for long enough, Kyungsoo, I know I want this.”

He shouldn’t have, but Kyungsoo laughed. He laughed because he was confused and because he didn’t know how to apologize. By that afternoon, Jongin was gone again. They fought a lot over the phone. Jongin cried while Kyungsoo stayed quiet and picked at his palms. The next time Kyungsoo saw him was in a diner, at four o’clock in the morning. Then it was like they kept passing but never saw each other again.

A month later, Jongin was expelled. He had been at the top of his class, slotted for scholarships and galleries others could only imagine. And then, in a flash, all he had left was a beaten-up duffel bag full of nearly-empty spray paint bottles. After Kyungsoo heard the news, he sold his sculpting studio and began gathering funds for a business. He stopped seeing art. It had felt like the end of a very long dream. They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t talk at all. Kyungsoo couldn’t understand what they were turning into and he didn’t attempt to. When Jongin finally showed up to Kyungsoo’s apartment six months later, Kyungsoo let him in as before, and nothing and everything had changed.

Outside, a mist begins clouding the street. A traffic light bleeds in the distance, the broken yolk of an egg. If Kyungsoo closes his eyes, the rain sounds like sand, like he’s caught in the nadir of a tremendous desert storm, just himself and the sand pooling quietly at his feet, filling his ears and mouth and lungs, wrapping around his outstretched fingers, cold everywhere it touches him, cold as it swallows him whole.

Kyungsoo inhales. Six years after, this bus route is still the loneliest in the world.

••••••••••••

The rain has stopped by the time Kyungsoo steps off. A few street lights are on, blazing softly over the wet pavement under a sky greying with dawn. The place hasn’t changed from back when they had their first date. The buildings are where he remembers them to be—the little Chinese restaurant ran by a Pilipino man, the hair salon doubling as an ahjumma corner, the pharmacy and the herbal medicine store facing each other at the brink of war. But it isn’t exactly how it was; the roads have aged, cement cracked and left unfilled, lined with trees like weed. Kyungsoo walks seven blocks beside this newer rendition. By the end, at edge of the abandoned lot, he closes his eyes and realizes that something within him, too, has changed.

After squeezing through the fence, the wall isn’t so far off. Kyungsoo picks his way through the puddles and the splotches of weeds. The sun is on his back. Half the world is on fire. Meters before the wall, Kyungsoo stops. To the side of the wall, where Jongin had first given him a bottle and told him to try shaking it, where Jongin had guided his hands over their creation, where they had fallen in love, the flower from all those years ago, fading and nearly colorless, is still there. But Kyungsoo can tell Jongin has been coming back again and again. The gradient of fresher paint stretches over the wall, all of the graffiti threading out from atop the original, more a camellia blossoming in two dimensions than a firework disappearing over the sky. And the thing is, nothing's changed. Nothing's been written over. Jongin's never made anything bigger or more beautiful than it was. He worked around them, the parts that are uglier or strange or rushed. Incorporated them into something bigger, a flora, an enormous kingdom of life—some blooming, some withering, but all integral, a part of the whole.

And maybe, Kyungsoo thinks as he touches the wall, traces a winding line from where they began to where they are now, where the paint is so new it might stain his fingers, Jongin understood what they had all along. Maybe, when Jongin came back after every fight of theirs, unannounced and eager, it wasn’t to restart. It was to continue.

Kyungsoo rests on the wall, rain staining through his shirt. He remembers how they broke up. They didn’t fight. Jongin had never once fought him all these years. Each time Jongin would roll out of bed, muttering about not coming back at the right time. He’d grab his jacket. He’d leave, stumbling down the hallway barefoot, forgetting nearly everything but his rumpled jacket. And Kyungsoo had let Jongin go. Every time Jongin had come back, he had let him go, afraid to reap a deficit, to be let down. When he’d thought Jongin couldn’t understand real art, perhaps it was he who, tottering at the precipice, had refused to see art for what it was, to reach out and expose himself.

And Kyungsoo remembers laying in the bed, unmoving, staring at the crack of the door and listening to Jongin's disappearing footsteps, scared breathless with his arm on the fading warmth of where Jongin had been.

And he regrets not following after Jongin. Not telling him to stay. Not telling him he wants him to stay. There was a whole wall Jongin had built for the two of them, and Kyungsoo had never accepted it. He’d let Jongin down, time and time again--and he is sorry, he is so sorry, so sorry--but sorry, he knows, isn’t always enough. Jongin’s gone. He hasn’t come back. He might never come back.

So for the first time in his life, Kyungsoo stops waiting for Jongin. Following that is neither a miracle nor a storm. He only stands up, smooths the wrinkles out of his shirt and trousers, and takes a step, the first to a long road home.

••••••••••••

The fish market opens before dawn. Kyungsoo hasn’t been since--years, maybe--and he’s lost instantly in the crowds, amongst the housewives and cooks and grocers, the vivid colors of the tents and the rubber gloves and the trucks and roads swirling like northern lights around him. He picks through the stands, one by one, and by the time he’s home, the back of his car smells of the sea.

A call comes from the office. Kyungsoo answers it while washing out a clay pot.

He says, “I’m taking the day off. Is Chanyeol still in the city?”

“What? Probably?”

“Forward me his address.”

“Sure, but what should I do with your appointments?” Junmyeon asks. Kyungsoo puts him on speakerphone so he can tie his apron properly.

“Cancel them,” he says, turning on the stove, “And Junmyeon?”

“Yes?”

“Vacation days are useless if you don’t take them.”

The soup turns out to be too salty and too spicy. He sends it to Chanyeol anyway, leaves it on his doorstep with an empty note because he didn’t know what to write inside. There isn’t much to announce, besides. Chanyeol would know. He’d over-react and exaggerate and jump to all the conclusions, but he would understand.

••••••••••••

On Tuesday, Kyungsoo shows up to work six hours late. The back rooms are practically in a riot. Interns and assistants tail him with their questions and concerns like the Pied Piper before he’s even managed a foot through the door. But something isn’t the same. Sehun isn’t there to scowl at him and pour disgusting coffee. He’d quit, Kyungsoo recalls vaguely, as Junmyeon talks him through the day’s agenda.

“Also, Chanyeol and Baekhyun are in your office,” Junmyeon notes as Kyungsoo opens the door, quickly scampering away.

“Baekhyun doesn’t look it, but he’s very sorry,” is the first thing Chanyeol says, ever the mediator.

Kyungsoo looks at the two of them, Baekhyun stubbornly avoiding his eyes, Chanyeol with his Boy Scouts smile, and he realizes that he’s utterly exhausted.

“I’m sorry,” Baekhyun says, after a long pause, “It was none of my business how you do your job. Also I hope your face is okay.”

“Kyungsoo doesn’t look it, but he’s not going to eat you,” Chanyeol dubs. Kyungsoo swats him on the head.

This time he pulls out a guest chair and sits beside them, instead of in the leather desk chair across from them. “Shut up, Chanyeol,” he says. “And Baekhyun, I’m—my face is fine. Thanks.”

“What he meant to say was ‘I’m sorry too,’” Chanyeol translates. Kyungsoo nearly breaks his neck in a choke-hold.

••••••••••••

“Give me a brilliant one-liner about, uh, angles or lighting or something, that French stuff, you know, the bullshit you say to clients,” says an unknown number, “I need to get into Lu Han’s pants.”

Kyungsoo frowns, dropping the duffel bag he’d just picked up, “Sehun? Also Lu Han? The photographer Lu Han?”

“Kyungsoo, I have maybe like two seconds before I miss my chance to get laid,” Sehun’s voice echoes between the blaring sound of club music.

Staring at his cup of coffee, Kyungsoo sees the outline of Jongin’s silhouette on the couch, face buried in the pillows and limbs thrown everywhere; he sees their shadows over the kitchen floor, sees Jongin coming through the door all those times these years: a rebellious adolescent at first, and later with wrinkles beginning on his face: a new person but as deeply in love as when he’d started, one who had spent his life running, not away but to return, not to erase but to rekindle. He thinks, vaguely, about art, files through the theory and history classes he’d taken, the practiced lines he’d thrown at buyers, the seminars and the cocktail parties and the auctions, and comes up blank.

“I don’t know,” Kyungsoo says.

“Jesus Christ. Of all the people on the planet to go soft,” Sehun mutters, hanging up.

Kyungsoo laughs, tosses the phone on the table, picks up his duffel bag and car keys again and walks out of his office hours too early.

“I’m going out,” Kyungsoo announces, tossing the building keys on Junmyeon’s desk.

“When are you coming back?” Junmyeon asks, wide-eyed, “Christie’s is calling later about that Edward Munch—”

“I’ll be back,” is all Kyungsoo says, and then he’s out, in the open, free. He guns it down the free-way, steps out of his car still in his Sinclair suit, shirt unbuttoned, sleeves hitched up to the elbows, and begins tagging a train car. Just like the first time, he holds the nozzle too close the wall, and the colors aren’t quite as advertised, and the lines are dull and soft—but it’s good enough.

As the sun sets, one by one graffiti writers pass and begin to join him. Some of them are young, in their high school uniform slacks, some are old, half-shaven, in jeans and wife-beaters. They don’t speak, don’t care about who you are, where you come from, what you bring. There is only the smell of paint and the fervent body heat of creation. And there amidst of the frenzy, the brilliant racket, a thousand memories and emotions and wants bursting forth at once, Kyungsoo extends a hand and touches the wet paint on the rusting iron, quiet and breathless. He put his thumb to the skin beneath the curling edge of old paint, a spark jolting into a fire. He closes his eyes and feels it, feels that old thrum of blood under his finger, calling his name, drawing him closer, like that image of the sun webbed on the surface of the pond a dozen miles over you.

Together they complete a whole train before the patrol officer shows up, and then they’re gone as fast as they’d gathered. Kyungsoo leaves his bag behind, leaves everything behind but the tingle in his chest and the paint sticky on his hand, no idea which route to take, but certain of where he’s going.

••••••••••••

Jongin finds him sprawled over the spot in the abandoned lot, next to the wall, that old place. The sun has risen again, bleaching the horizon. Kyungsoo is lying on the damp ground with the scent of soil soaking into his back. He doesn’t remember falling asleep.

Jongin asks, “How did you find me?”

Kyungsoo cracks his eyes open and squints up at Jongin’s face, the light filtering through his hair. He can barely make out Jongin’s features from this angle. “Is this the present you meant to give me?”

An unreadable look crawls over Jongin’s face. “I didn’t think you’d remember.”

Kyungsoo chuckles, shutting his eyes. “The transitions are no good. You’ve lost your touch, Rembrandt.”

“I know,” Jongin says, a second later, laughing quietly.

The silence is so fragile a single breath might break it.

“I broke up with her. I just wanted to tell you that I’m single now, if you--I’m sorry,” Kyungsoo says, half-laughing. It’s not funny, he knows. A lump distends in his throat; his nose begins aching and stomach knotting. A sort of gigantic fear expands in his chest, rock-solid, unyielding and dense. “I’m sorry, Jongin.”

Jongin doesn’t answer. Kyungsoo hears him shifting and, without thinking, rolls up and grabs Jongin just, anywhere. His face is wet, his fingers shaking. He doesn’t want to but his voice emerges ragged like the groan of a canvas yielding under a thin iron blade. “I won’t let you go. I’ll never let you leave again.”

••••••••••••

They walk barefoot to the bus stop. Kyungsoo has his shoes dangling off his fingers. It’s noon, overcast. The landscape looks gentler in the day-time. Little bits of gravel and grass plop off his heel at each step. He could grow used to this.

“I’m thinking about painting something,” Kyungsoo asks, “want to help?”

“Oh, but I’m no professional,” Jongin says, his voice quivering. He sniffs.

Kyungsoo says, “You’re a professional when it comes to vandalizing my apartment.”

They both pretend not to see how Jongin’s gone red to the ears—“I’m hungry”—which is ridiculous, they’ve spent a decade together, far too long to be shy like this—“Where do you want to go?”—but maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe they’re still eighteen and nearing eighteen, naive and careless—“I don’t know”—and their fingers, sticky with paint and sweat, bump and bump and entwine together—“Then let’s go home”—and it will be all right, it will be—“All right.”

••••••••••••

8AM on the dot, Kyungsoo steps back into the gallery. It’s been a week—a whole century in gallery time, although everything’s still where they used to be, down to the old Starbucks cup Kyungsoo had forgotten on his side table. Chanyeol, unsurprisingly, is lying in ambush with yet another mess to be mopped up, and the handful of interns scurry helplessly after Kyungsoo per usual.

Half-way through pounding a kid about invitation copies, with Chanyeol constantly trying to insert a word here and there, Kyungsoo spots a speck of green on the work bench at the end of the corridor. His stomach flips.

“Your hair is awful,” Sehun says casually, sipping out of another unidentified green thing.

Kyungsoo purses his lips, “If I recall correctly, you quit.”

“I un-quit,” Sehun replies, neat as a pin.

“No, Sehun,” Kyungsoo explains, so angry he can’t actually begin to process how angry he is, “You can’t un-quit a job just like you can’t hire yourself, just like how you aren’t supposed to consume unlabeled green liqui—”

“Yeah, but I’m still alive.”

“More importantly,” Chanyeol finally intercepts more than a phrase for once, “Baekhyun and I have six seats reserved at Midnight Tofu’s. Me, Jongin, you, and the guys. Couple of good pals, knocking back a few. What do you say?”

“I’ll need a ride home though,” Junmyeon responds, poking his head over the bench.

“Don’t be smart. No one invited you,” Sehun says. Junmyeon deflates and retreats.

“So?” Chanyeol beams.

Kyungsoo thinks about it. He shakes his head. There’s work to be done. There is always work to do. Piles and piles on his table. Forms to be filled, memos to be read, inquiries to be answered.

Though Chanyeol doesn’t hide his disappointment, he doesn’t pursue it either. Eventually, Kyungsoo’s office clears of intruders and he sits down at his table, beginning to work through a batch of over-due documents.

Kyungsoo does not look up again until the hour hand’s moved to six and, of course, catches Jongin with his face glued to the window. He bites down a laugh.

Waving excitably, Jongin mimes some kind of message about hurrying. His breaths fog up the glass. In the distance, Chanyeol flashes the headlights to his Hummer. Somehow Kyungsoo knew Chanyeol was going to pull this.

“Oh, I suppose, just once,” Kyungsoo mutters, leaving all the papers untouched and unread and incomplete on the table to throw on his jacket and scarf.

In the parking lot, the first snowflakes trip through the air, like cotton and like pocket prayers, each flake to a tune in chromatic scales, an atom of a mounting polyphony. It goes melting into the quiet murmur of white over the roads, the cars, the buildings, Jongin’s shoulders, Jongin’s hair, Jongin’s lashes. Jongin is all bundled up and shivering into his old leather jacket, and it’s funny how half of Kyungsoo’s life is just standing there, with a hand extended, waiting for him.

Speeding from a walk, Kyungsoo sprints towards Jongin, happy and angry and lonely and terrified, always terrified, all the misery, regrets, and let-down hopes buried and burning in his heart.

Somewhere out there, a world is ending, in whimpers and in bangs. This one will too, like all worlds, but not yet, not as Kyungsoo reaches out for Jongin, for the rest of his life, ready.

They don’t look back.

* * *


End file.
